D�j� vu all over again. The two-tiered justice system rears its head yet again

[rogue06]

Remember when Comey laid out a pretty much open-and-shut case against Hillary but then declined to recommend it be pursued? Looks like it is happening again, but this time involving Special Prosecutor Robert Hur and old Joe regarding all of the classified documents he pilfered and left spread out across two states.

Hur declared that old Joe had "willfully retained and disclosed classified materials" but is declining to prosecute him for it. Essentially saying that his current dementia gives him a free pass.



Biden ‘willfully’ kept classified info, would come off as ‘elderly man with poor memory’ at trial, scathing report says

Special counsel Robert Hur found that President Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” following his vice presidency — but recommended that the commander-in-chief not face charges Thursday.

The 388-page report by Hur, a former Maryland US attorney, cited the longstanding precedent against indicting sitting presidents — before suggesting that if Biden, 81, were to face trial, he “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Hur, whose report was released by Congress after the White House declined to assert privilege of any of its contents, found that classified records hoarded by Biden included documents concerning military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, as well as notebooks with handwritten entries about national security and foreign policy issues “implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods.”

According to the special counsel, Biden kept the documents to inform the writing of two memoirs published in 2007 and 2017, as well as “to document his legacy, and to cite as evidence that he was a man of presidential timber.”

“In a recorded conversation with his ghostwriter in February 2017, about a month after he left office, Mr. Biden said … that he had ‘just found all the classified stuff downstairs,'” the report noted.

“At least three times Mr. Biden read from classified entries aloud to his ghostwriter nearly verbatim.”

Sensitive records from Biden’s vice presidency and Senate tenure were stored without proper safeguards at his residence in Wilmington, Del., and at his pre-presidency office in DC provided by the University of Pennsylvania.

Hur’s investigation into the 81-year-old president was notably quiet, with few leaks to the media — unlike the headline-grabbing probe of former President Donald Trump on similar grounds.

When taking note of evidence that “Biden knew he could not keep classified handwritten notes at home after leaving office,” Hur highlighted the president’s reaction to the classified document ordeal engulfing his predecessor.

“Asked about reports that former President [donald Trump] Trump had kept classified documents at his own home, Mr. Biden wondered how ‘anyone could be that irresponsible,'” the report archly noted.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Hur to investigate Biden’s handling of records dating to his vice presidency and Senate years on Jan. 12 of last year — after sequential admissions of new discoveries by the White House.

Biden was interviewed by investigators in October — roughly a year after he chided Trump as “irresponsible” for retaining classified documents.

Biden’s lawyers said they initially found classified documents on Nov. 2 while clearing out his former office at the Penn Biden Center near Capitol Hill.

The discovery, six days before the midterm elections, was kept quiet until CBS News broke the story Jan. 9.

Additional Biden classified documents were found on Dec. 20 in his Wilmington garage, followed by a series of additional discoveries at the home, including by the FBI, which also searched Biden’s Rehoboth Beach, Del., vacation home and left with written notes.

Biden sought to downplay the controversy, telling PBS last February, “To the best of my knowledge, the kind of things they picked up are things that — from 1974, stray papers.”

“There is no there there,” Biden told reporters last January.

Biden first publicly acknowledged the discovery of classified documents at the Penn Biden Center at a Jan. 10 press conference in Mexico City.

In his initial remarks, Biden didn’t say that a second cache of classified documents had been found in his Wilmington garage.

Biden admitted on Jan. 12 that records were found next to his classic Corvette in Wilmington, but denied he was reckless with the nation’s secrets.

“My Corvette is in a locked garage, OK? So it’s not like they’re sitting out on the street,” Biden said.

The White House said at the time that searches for records were complete, but additional documents were found by Biden’s lawyers. An FBI search found six more items with classification markings.

Trump, 77, is seeking a rematch against Biden in the November election and has alleged a double standard.

The 45th president faces 40 criminal charges and a maximum penalty of 450 years in prison for allegedly mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021.

The FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm beach, Fla., to retrieve documents in August 2022 — just months before the revelation that Biden had stashed classified documents at various locations, including in his home garage, which lacked Secret Service protection for a period of time.

The ex-president allegedly hindered attempts by the National Archives to retrieve the documents, which he argued he was entitled to keep under the Presidential Records Act.

Ya know, if he's basically unfit for trial, that ought to be an indication about his fitness to lead.

[mossrose]

And you're surprised, why?

[CivilDiscourse]

More things from the report certainly go a long way towards explaining why he gives so few interviews and unplanned appearences.

[Mountain Man]

The "elderly man with a poor memory" argument doesn't fly when Joe spent decades bringing home classified documents. The fact that he was a senator and later vice president at the time makes it even worse since he didn't have anything approaching presidential authority.

[CivilDiscourse]

I'm sure given the report, democrats will call for the 25th amendment to be invoked.

[RumTumTugger]

Remember when Comey laid out a pretty much open-and-shut case against Hillary but then declined to recommend it be pursued? Looks like it is happening again, but this time involving Special Prosecutor Robert Hur and old Joe regarding all of the classified documents he pilfered and left spread out across two states.

Hur declared that old Joe had "willfully retained and disclosed classified materials" but is declining to prosecute him for it. Essentially saying that his current dementia gives him a free pass.



Biden ‘willfully’ kept classified info, would come off as ‘elderly man with poor memory’ at trial, scathing report says

Special counsel Robert Hur found that President Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” following his vice presidency — but recommended that the commander-in-chief not face charges Thursday.

The 388-page report by Hur, a former Maryland US attorney, cited the longstanding precedent against indicting sitting presidents — before suggesting that if Biden, 81, were to face trial, he “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Hur, whose report was released by Congress after the White House declined to assert privilege of any of its contents, found that classified records hoarded by Biden included documents concerning military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, as well as notebooks with handwritten entries about national security and foreign policy issues “implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods.”

According to the special counsel, Biden kept the documents to inform the writing of two memoirs published in 2007 and 2017, as well as “to document his legacy, and to cite as evidence that he was a man of presidential timber.”

“In a recorded conversation with his ghostwriter in February 2017, about a month after he left office, Mr. Biden said … that he had ‘just found all the classified stuff downstairs,'” the report noted.

“At least three times Mr. Biden read from classified entries aloud to his ghostwriter nearly verbatim.”

Sensitive records from Biden’s vice presidency and Senate tenure were stored without proper safeguards at his residence in Wilmington, Del., and at his pre-presidency office in DC provided by the University of Pennsylvania.

Hur’s investigation into the 81-year-old president was notably quiet, with few leaks to the media — unlike the headline-grabbing probe of former President Donald Trump on similar grounds.

When taking note of evidence that “Biden knew he could not keep classified handwritten notes at home after leaving office,” Hur highlighted the president’s reaction to the classified document ordeal engulfing his predecessor.

“Asked about reports that former President [donald Trump] Trump had kept classified documents at his own home, Mr. Biden wondered how ‘anyone could be that irresponsible,'” the report archly noted.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Hur to investigate Biden’s handling of records dating to his vice presidency and Senate years on Jan. 12 of last year — after sequential admissions of new discoveries by the White House.

Biden was interviewed by investigators in October — roughly a year after he chided Trump as “irresponsible” for retaining classified documents.

Biden’s lawyers said they initially found classified documents on Nov. 2 while clearing out his former office at the Penn Biden Center near Capitol Hill.

The discovery, six days before the midterm elections, was kept quiet until CBS News broke the story Jan. 9.

Additional Biden classified documents were found on Dec. 20 in his Wilmington garage, followed by a series of additional discoveries at the home, including by the FBI, which also searched Biden’s Rehoboth Beach, Del., vacation home and left with written notes.

Biden sought to downplay the controversy, telling PBS last February, “To the best of my knowledge, the kind of things they picked up are things that — from 1974, stray papers.”

“There is no there there,” Biden told reporters last January.

Biden first publicly acknowledged the discovery of classified documents at the Penn Biden Center at a Jan. 10 press conference in Mexico City.

In his initial remarks, Biden didn’t say that a second cache of classified documents had been found in his Wilmington garage.

Biden admitted on Jan. 12 that records were found next to his classic Corvette in Wilmington, but denied he was reckless with the nation’s secrets.

“My Corvette is in a locked garage, OK? So it’s not like they’re sitting out on the street,” Biden said.

The White House said at the time that searches for records were complete, but additional documents were found by Biden’s lawyers. An FBI search found six more items with classification markings.

Trump, 77, is seeking a rematch against Biden in the November election and has alleged a double standard.

The 45th president faces 40 criminal charges and a maximum penalty of 450 years in prison for allegedly mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021.

The FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm beach, Fla., to retrieve documents in August 2022 — just months before the revelation that Biden had stashed classified documents at various locations, including in his home garage, which lacked Secret Service protection for a period of time.

The ex-president allegedly hindered attempts by the National Archives to retrieve the documents, which he argued he was entitled to keep under the Presidential Records Act.

Ya know, if he's basically unfit for trial, that ought to be an indication about his fitness to lead.

Looks like the Democrats are in a catch 22 situation here. If they try to argue that Biden is mentally competent enough to be president then he is mentally competent to stand trial. If they go with the report and he is not mentally competent to stand trial, he is not mentally competent The provision of the 25th amendment article 4 should come into play and if harris and his staff or the Democrats in the congress don't declare him unable to do his duties as President what does that say about the party that keeps saying the republicans care nothing about the welfare of the country.

[seer]

Looks like the Democrats are in a catch 22 situation here. If they try to argue that Biden is mentally competent enough to be president then he is mentally competent to stand trial. If they go with the report and he is not mentally competent to stand trial then The provision of the 25th amendment article 4 come into play

Since when did they care about consistency?

[seanD]

I find it interesting that they sacrificed his cognitive ability for sake of avoiding criminal prosecution.

[Stoic]

Looks like the Democrats are in a catch 22 situation here. If they try to argue that Biden is mentally competent enough to be president then he is mentally competent to stand trial. If they go with the report and he is not mentally competent to stand trial, he is not mentally competent The provision of the 25th amendment article 4 should come into play and if harris and his staff or the Democrats in the congress don't declare him unable to do his duties as President what does that say about the party that keeps saying the republicans care nothing about the welfare of the country.

I don't think you'll find any Democrats arguing that Biden isn't mentally competent to stand trial. Even Robert Hur, the Republican Special Counsel, isn't arguing that. He just doesn't think he can prove Biden is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And prosecutors don't generally charge someone if they don't think they can prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt.

[rogue06]

More things from the report certainly go a long way towards explaining why he gives so few interviews and unplanned appearences.

His keepers put the kibosh on the traditional presidential interview for the Super bowl. That's something president's relish since it is typically with a sympathetic reporter who lobs marshmallow-like softball questions. Apparently they don't think he can even handle that much now.

[rogue06]

I find it interesting that they sacrificed his cognitive ability for sake of avoiding criminal prosecution.

Probably not much choice. It appears to be an open and shut case.

[rogue06]

Wow. It's looking like his keepers have either taken old Joe off, cold turkey, of whatever junk they were pumping into him to get a few moments of lucidity out of him, or the stuff has lost all effectiveness.

From the WaPo...


Special counsel report paints scathing picture of Biden’s memory

President Biden, during interviews with the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents, had trouble recalling the years he served as vice president. He could not pinpoint, even within several years, when his son Beau had died. His memory about a crucial debate on troop levels in Afghanistan was hazy.

The first day of questioning, at the White House in early October, Biden could not recall when his vice-presidential term had ended. “If it was 2013 — when did I stop being vice president?” he asked, apparently not recalling that he left office in January 2017.

The next day, as the interviews continued, he could not remember when his term began, saying, “In 2009, am I still vice president?”

Special counsel Robert K. Hur’s report, while concluding that criminal charges were not merited for Biden’s careless handling of classified documents, painted a devastating portrait of an 81-year-old president whose age has become a central issue in his reelection campaign, saying his memory was “significantly limited” and that he had “limited precision and recall.” One reason prosecutors concluded they would have trouble pursuing a case was that a jury might see Biden as an appealing — if forgetful — senior citizen.

“At trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” the prosecutors wrote in their report released Thursday. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

Biden responded to the special counsel’s report in an angry appearance at the White House on Thursday evening. “I know what the hell I’m doing,” he told reporters.

He expressed particular fury at Hur for using his son’s death, which he said he remembers every single day, as a means of questioning his acuity. “I don’t need anyone to remind me of when he passed away,” Biden said in remarks that were unusually emotional.

In essence, the report cleared Biden of any legal hurdles. But it opened — or reopened — a series of political questions.

The report was released a day after Biden twice misstated which German leader he had met with at an event in 2021, saying he spoke with Helmut Kohl, who left office in 1998 and died in 2017, rather than Angela Merkel. Several days earlier he confused the current French president, Emmanuel Macron, with a predecessor, Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996.

Biden has mixed up the names of his Cabinet members, and during an event in 2022 he called out for a recently deceased congresswoman, attempting to acknowledge her from the stage and apparently forgetting that she had recently died. At another point he struggled to recall the name of the prime minister of Australia and referring to him as “that fellow Down Under.”

Biden throughout his career has been a gaffe-prone politician who can meander into verbal cul-de-sacs, a trait that at times he has worn as a relatable badge of honor. But in recent years, his verbal missteps have often been seen through the prism of old age, a perception that has been difficult for him to alter after urging skeptics to “just watch me.”

Hur was charged with determining whether Biden mishandled national secrets, but he repeatedly returned to Biden’s ostensibly poor memory. The coming days and weeks will clarify how much of a political penalty Biden will pay for the unflattering portrait.

But his political rivals wasted little time seizing on it. “It just affirms what most Americans already know, which is the president is a good man but cannot continue to serve as our commander in chief beyond January 2025,” said Rep. Dean Phillips (Minn.), who is challenging Biden for the Democratic nomination.

Some Biden allies initially downplayed the severity of the report, saying it would be largely forgotten within days. But as the full scope of the report emerged, Biden officials and allies conceded the portrait of Biden would have lasting consequences and provide a gift to the Trump campaign. Still, they forcefully rejected any talk of the president stepping aside and not running for reelection.

Inside the White House and throughout the Democratic Party, Democrats directed their fury at Hur, assailing him for his characterization of Biden’s mental fitness and arguing that he went far beyond his mandate of determining whether the president or his aides committed crimes. They cast the report as a partisan shot from a Republican prosecutor, albeit one assigned to the task by Biden-appointed Attorney General Merrick Garland.

“It’s a partisan document,” said Jim Messina, who ran Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and is supporting Biden’s reelection. “You have got a Republican person here who can’t find anything to charge the president with, so he is taking a few partisan political shots.”

But Democrats also conceded privately that Biden’s age has always been his biggest vulnerability. In recent weeks, the Biden campaign has found more ways for the president to connect personally with voters, believing that would help counteract any concerns that he has lost a step.

Last month, Biden brought food from a restaurant called Cook Out to a private home in North Carolina, chatting with the family about his administration’s student loan forgiveness program. He has also made stops in recent weeks at a barbershop in South Carolina and a boba tea store in Nevada, visits that aides say rocket around social media and improve Biden’s image among voters, particularly younger ones.

Biden’s aides, who insist that he is sharp and detail-oriented despite the occasional verbal stumble, also attributed his struggles to recall specific dates during the Hur interviews to their timing on Oct. 8 and 9, when he was preoccupied by Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel a day earlier.

“I was so determined to give the special counsel what they needed that I went forward with five hours of in-person interviews over two days on Oct. 8 and 9 of last year, even though Israel had just been attacked on Oct. 7 and I was in the middle of handling an international crisis,” Biden said in a statement just after the report was released. “I just believed that’s what I owed the American people.”

The White House also emphasized that — unlike in a similar probe of former president Donald Trump — the special counsel decided against prosecuting. “The bottom line is the special counsel, in my case, decided against moving with any charges. This matter is now closed,” Biden said on Thursday.

Yet it’s clear that Hur’s language frustrated Biden’s circle. His attorneys, White House special counsel Richard Sauber and personal attorney Bob Bauer, wrote a letter to Hur vigorously objecting to his comments about Biden’s memory.

“The President’s inability to recall dates or details of events that happened years ago is neither surprising nor unusual, especially given that many questions asked him to recall the particulars of staff work to pack, ship, and store materials and furniture in the course of moves between residences,” the lawyers wrote. “The same predictable memory loss occurred with other witnesses in this investigation.”

They argued that Hur was treating Biden differently from other witnesses who also had trouble recalling long-ago events, and that he did so “in prejudicial and inflammatory terms.”

“You refer to President Biden’s memory on at least nine occasions — a number that is itself gratuitous,” they wrote. “This language is not supported by the facts, nor is it appropriately used by a federal prosecutor in this context. We request that you revisit your descriptions of President Biden’s memory and revise them so that they are stated in a manner that is within the bounds of your expertise and remit.”

However, it appears that Hur did not alter the report in response to the attorneys’ arguments.

The report cites Biden’s recorded conversations with his ghostwriter in 2017, saying they are “often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.” It added, “In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse.”

In addition to recounting Biden’s troubles with dates, the prosecutors suggested he had confused other matters as well. “His memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he ‘had a real difference’ of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally.”

Biden is also portrayed as a pack rat who haphazardly stored classified documents in a crowded garage. Documents related to Afghanistan, they wrote, were found “in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood.”

That state of affairs, they said, could be used by Biden’s attorneys to suggest to a jury that he was merely messy and forgetful, not someone who was intentionally trying to hoard classified documents.

“A reasonable juror could conclude that this is not where a person intentionally stores what he supposedly considers to be important classified documents, critical to his legacy,” the report stated. “Rather, it looks more like a place a person stores classified documents he has forgotten about or is unaware of.”

In a statement Thursday, House Republican leaders, including Speaker Mike Johnson (La.), called the special counsel’s assessment of Biden’s memory one of the “most disturbing” aspects of his report.

“A man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office,” said the statement by Johnson, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.).

Trump is facing charges under more serious allegations for taking classified documents, particularly his alleged refusal to return them when asked. And Trump, 77, has struggled with his own memory issues, most recently confusing former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, his chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

As mentioned, old Joe is upset with the report but the good news is is anger won't last since he'll likely have forgotten about it by tomorrow morning.

[rogue06]

Wow. It's looking like his keepers have either taken old Joe off, cold turkey, of whatever junk they were pumping into him to get a few moments of lucidity out of him, or the stuff has lost all effectiveness.

From the WaPo...


Special counsel report paints scathing picture of Biden’s memory

President Biden, during interviews with the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents, had trouble recalling the years he served as vice president. He could not pinpoint, even within several years, when his son Beau had died. His memory about a crucial debate on troop levels in Afghanistan was hazy.

The first day of questioning, at the White House in early October, Biden could not recall when his vice-presidential term had ended. “If it was 2013 — when did I stop being vice president?” he asked, apparently not recalling that he left office in January 2017.

The next day, as the interviews continued, he could not remember when his term began, saying, “In 2009, am I still vice president?”

Special counsel Robert K. Hur’s report, while concluding that criminal charges were not merited for Biden’s careless handling of classified documents, painted a devastating portrait of an 81-year-old president whose age has become a central issue in his reelection campaign, saying his memory was “significantly limited” and that he had “limited precision and recall.” One reason prosecutors concluded they would have trouble pursuing a case was that a jury might see Biden as an appealing — if forgetful — senior citizen.

“At trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” the prosecutors wrote in their report released Thursday. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

Biden responded to the special counsel’s report in an angry appearance at the White House on Thursday evening. “I know what the hell I’m doing,” he told reporters.

He expressed particular fury at Hur for using his son’s death, which he said he remembers every single day, as a means of questioning his acuity. “I don’t need anyone to remind me of when he passed away,” Biden said in remarks that were unusually emotional.

In essence, the report cleared Biden of any legal hurdles. But it opened — or reopened — a series of political questions.

The report was released a day after Biden twice misstated which German leader he had met with at an event in 2021, saying he spoke with Helmut Kohl, who left office in 1998 and died in 2017, rather than Angela Merkel. Several days earlier he confused the current French president, Emmanuel Macron, with a predecessor, Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996.

Biden has mixed up the names of his Cabinet members, and during an event in 2022 he called out for a recently deceased congresswoman, attempting to acknowledge her from the stage and apparently forgetting that she had recently died. At another point he struggled to recall the name of the prime minister of Australia and referring to him as “that fellow Down Under.”

Biden throughout his career has been a gaffe-prone politician who can meander into verbal cul-de-sacs, a trait that at times he has worn as a relatable badge of honor. But in recent years, his verbal missteps have often been seen through the prism of old age, a perception that has been difficult for him to alter after urging skeptics to “just watch me.”

Hur was charged with determining whether Biden mishandled national secrets, but he repeatedly returned to Biden’s ostensibly poor memory. The coming days and weeks will clarify how much of a political penalty Biden will pay for the unflattering portrait.

But his political rivals wasted little time seizing on it. “It just affirms what most Americans already know, which is the president is a good man but cannot continue to serve as our commander in chief beyond January 2025,” said Rep. Dean Phillips (Minn.), who is challenging Biden for the Democratic nomination.

Some Biden allies initially downplayed the severity of the report, saying it would be largely forgotten within days. But as the full scope of the report emerged, Biden officials and allies conceded the portrait of Biden would have lasting consequences and provide a gift to the Trump campaign. Still, they forcefully rejected any talk of the president stepping aside and not running for reelection.

Inside the White House and throughout the Democratic Party, Democrats directed their fury at Hur, assailing him for his characterization of Biden’s mental fitness and arguing that he went far beyond his mandate of determining whether the president or his aides committed crimes. They cast the report as a partisan shot from a Republican prosecutor, albeit one assigned to the task by Biden-appointed Attorney General Merrick Garland.

“It’s a partisan document,” said Jim Messina, who ran Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and is supporting Biden’s reelection. “You have got a Republican person here who can’t find anything to charge the president with, so he is taking a few partisan political shots.”

But Democrats also conceded privately that Biden’s age has always been his biggest vulnerability. In recent weeks, the Biden campaign has found more ways for the president to connect personally with voters, believing that would help counteract any concerns that he has lost a step.

Last month, Biden brought food from a restaurant called Cook Out to a private home in North Carolina, chatting with the family about his administration’s student loan forgiveness program. He has also made stops in recent weeks at a barbershop in South Carolina and a boba tea store in Nevada, visits that aides say rocket around social media and improve Biden’s image among voters, particularly younger ones.

Biden’s aides, who insist that he is sharp and detail-oriented despite the occasional verbal stumble, also attributed his struggles to recall specific dates during the Hur interviews to their timing on Oct. 8 and 9, when he was preoccupied by Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel a day earlier.

“I was so determined to give the special counsel what they needed that I went forward with five hours of in-person interviews over two days on Oct. 8 and 9 of last year, even though Israel had just been attacked on Oct. 7 and I was in the middle of handling an international crisis,” Biden said in a statement just after the report was released. “I just believed that’s what I owed the American people.”

The White House also emphasized that — unlike in a similar probe of former president Donald Trump — the special counsel decided against prosecuting. “The bottom line is the special counsel, in my case, decided against moving with any charges. This matter is now closed,” Biden said on Thursday.

Yet it’s clear that Hur’s language frustrated Biden’s circle. His attorneys, White House special counsel Richard Sauber and personal attorney Bob Bauer, wrote a letter to Hur vigorously objecting to his comments about Biden’s memory.

“The President’s inability to recall dates or details of events that happened years ago is neither surprising nor unusual, especially given that many questions asked him to recall the particulars of staff work to pack, ship, and store materials and furniture in the course of moves between residences,” the lawyers wrote. “The same predictable memory loss occurred with other witnesses in this investigation.”

They argued that Hur was treating Biden differently from other witnesses who also had trouble recalling long-ago events, and that he did so “in prejudicial and inflammatory terms.”

“You refer to President Biden’s memory on at least nine occasions — a number that is itself gratuitous,” they wrote. “This language is not supported by the facts, nor is it appropriately used by a federal prosecutor in this context. We request that you revisit your descriptions of President Biden’s memory and revise them so that they are stated in a manner that is within the bounds of your expertise and remit.”

However, it appears that Hur did not alter the report in response to the attorneys’ arguments.

The report cites Biden’s recorded conversations with his ghostwriter in 2017, saying they are “often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.” It added, “In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse.”

In addition to recounting Biden’s troubles with dates, the prosecutors suggested he had confused other matters as well. “His memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he ‘had a real difference’ of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally.”

Biden is also portrayed as a pack rat who haphazardly stored classified documents in a crowded garage. Documents related to Afghanistan, they wrote, were found “in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood.”

That state of affairs, they said, could be used by Biden’s attorneys to suggest to a jury that he was merely messy and forgetful, not someone who was intentionally trying to hoard classified documents.

“A reasonable juror could conclude that this is not where a person intentionally stores what he supposedly considers to be important classified documents, critical to his legacy,” the report stated. “Rather, it looks more like a place a person stores classified documents he has forgotten about or is unaware of.”

In a statement Thursday, House Republican leaders, including Speaker Mike Johnson (La.), called the special counsel’s assessment of Biden’s memory one of the “most disturbing” aspects of his report.

“A man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office,” said the statement by Johnson, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.).

Trump is facing charges under more serious allegations for taking classified documents, particularly his alleged refusal to return them when asked. And Trump, 77, has struggled with his own memory issues, most recently confusing former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, his chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

As mentioned, old Joe is upset with the report but the good news is is anger won't last since he'll likely have forgotten about it by tomorrow morning.

Just, damn.

It's almost like piling on at this point but this is turning into a really bad week for Biden.

While the special prosecutor's decision not to press forward with charging old Joe with criminal wrongdoing in spite of saying that he had "willfully retained and disclosed classified materials" -- saying the reason for not prosecuting is because he is effectively senile has to hurt.

And this is at the same time that old Joe has been talking to dead people again. Twice. This week he thought the French leader is Francois Mitterrand who has been dead for three decades, and that he talked to Germany's Helmut Kohl about J6 -- in spite of the fact he died back when Biden was still Vice President.

But now this on top of all that -- and while trying to convince people he isn't the feeble old man well into his dotage.

Biden Confuses Mexico and Egypt in Stunning Gaffe During Presser Meant to Assuage Fears About His Cognitive Function

Hours after the release of a Special Counsel report which took repeated shots at his cognitive function, President Joe Biden made a gaffe which seems certain to exacerbate the public’s concerns.

In a stunning moment during an impromptu White House news conference late Thursday, the president made a shocking gaffe by confusing Mexico with Egypt. The jawdropping error happened when Biden fielded a reporter’s question about Israel and Hamas.

“As you know, initially, the president of Mexico, al-Sisi did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in,” Biden said. “I talked to him. I convinced him to open the gate.”

The president was trying to refer to the leader of Egypt, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi.

[seanD]

Wow. It's looking like his keepers have either taken old Joe off, cold turkey, of whatever junk they were pumping into him to get a few moments of lucidity out of him, or the stuff has lost all effectiveness.

From the WaPo...


Special counsel report paints scathing picture of Biden’s memory

President Biden, during interviews with the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents, had trouble recalling the years he served as vice president. He could not pinpoint, even within several years, when his son Beau had died. His memory about a crucial debate on troop levels in Afghanistan was hazy.

The first day of questioning, at the White House in early October, Biden could not recall when his vice-presidential term had ended. “If it was 2013 — when did I stop being vice president?” he asked, apparently not recalling that he left office in January 2017.

The next day, as the interviews continued, he could not remember when his term began, saying, “In 2009, am I still vice president?”

Special counsel Robert K. Hur’s report, while concluding that criminal charges were not merited for Biden’s careless handling of classified documents, painted a devastating portrait of an 81-year-old president whose age has become a central issue in his reelection campaign, saying his memory was “significantly limited” and that he had “limited precision and recall.” One reason prosecutors concluded they would have trouble pursuing a case was that a jury might see Biden as an appealing — if forgetful — senior citizen.

“At trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” the prosecutors wrote in their report released Thursday. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

Biden responded to the special counsel’s report in an angry appearance at the White House on Thursday evening. “I know what the hell I’m doing,” he told reporters.

He expressed particular fury at Hur for using his son’s death, which he said he remembers every single day, as a means of questioning his acuity. “I don’t need anyone to remind me of when he passed away,” Biden said in remarks that were unusually emotional.

In essence, the report cleared Biden of any legal hurdles. But it opened — or reopened — a series of political questions.

The report was released a day after Biden twice misstated which German leader he had met with at an event in 2021, saying he spoke with Helmut Kohl, who left office in 1998 and died in 2017, rather than Angela Merkel. Several days earlier he confused the current French president, Emmanuel Macron, with a predecessor, Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996.

Biden has mixed up the names of his Cabinet members, and during an event in 2022 he called out for a recently deceased congresswoman, attempting to acknowledge her from the stage and apparently forgetting that she had recently died. At another point he struggled to recall the name of the prime minister of Australia and referring to him as “that fellow Down Under.”

Biden throughout his career has been a gaffe-prone politician who can meander into verbal cul-de-sacs, a trait that at times he has worn as a relatable badge of honor. But in recent years, his verbal missteps have often been seen through the prism of old age, a perception that has been difficult for him to alter after urging skeptics to “just watch me.”

Hur was charged with determining whether Biden mishandled national secrets, but he repeatedly returned to Biden’s ostensibly poor memory. The coming days and weeks will clarify how much of a political penalty Biden will pay for the unflattering portrait.

But his political rivals wasted little time seizing on it. “It just affirms what most Americans already know, which is the president is a good man but cannot continue to serve as our commander in chief beyond January 2025,” said Rep. Dean Phillips (Minn.), who is challenging Biden for the Democratic nomination.

Some Biden allies initially downplayed the severity of the report, saying it would be largely forgotten within days. But as the full scope of the report emerged, Biden officials and allies conceded the portrait of Biden would have lasting consequences and provide a gift to the Trump campaign. Still, they forcefully rejected any talk of the president stepping aside and not running for reelection.

Inside the White House and throughout the Democratic Party, Democrats directed their fury at Hur, assailing him for his characterization of Biden’s mental fitness and arguing that he went far beyond his mandate of determining whether the president or his aides committed crimes. They cast the report as a partisan shot from a Republican prosecutor, albeit one assigned to the task by Biden-appointed Attorney General Merrick Garland.

“It’s a partisan document,” said Jim Messina, who ran Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and is supporting Biden’s reelection. “You have got a Republican person here who can’t find anything to charge the president with, so he is taking a few partisan political shots.”

But Democrats also conceded privately that Biden’s age has always been his biggest vulnerability. In recent weeks, the Biden campaign has found more ways for the president to connect personally with voters, believing that would help counteract any concerns that he has lost a step.

Last month, Biden brought food from a restaurant called Cook Out to a private home in North Carolina, chatting with the family about his administration’s student loan forgiveness program. He has also made stops in recent weeks at a barbershop in South Carolina and a boba tea store in Nevada, visits that aides say rocket around social media and improve Biden’s image among voters, particularly younger ones.

Biden’s aides, who insist that he is sharp and detail-oriented despite the occasional verbal stumble, also attributed his struggles to recall specific dates during the Hur interviews to their timing on Oct. 8 and 9, when he was preoccupied by Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel a day earlier.

“I was so determined to give the special counsel what they needed that I went forward with five hours of in-person interviews over two days on Oct. 8 and 9 of last year, even though Israel had just been attacked on Oct. 7 and I was in the middle of handling an international crisis,” Biden said in a statement just after the report was released. “I just believed that’s what I owed the American people.”

The White House also emphasized that — unlike in a similar probe of former president Donald Trump — the special counsel decided against prosecuting. “The bottom line is the special counsel, in my case, decided against moving with any charges. This matter is now closed,” Biden said on Thursday.

Yet it’s clear that Hur’s language frustrated Biden’s circle. His attorneys, White House special counsel Richard Sauber and personal attorney Bob Bauer, wrote a letter to Hur vigorously objecting to his comments about Biden’s memory.

“The President’s inability to recall dates or details of events that happened years ago is neither surprising nor unusual, especially given that many questions asked him to recall the particulars of staff work to pack, ship, and store materials and furniture in the course of moves between residences,” the lawyers wrote. “The same predictable memory loss occurred with other witnesses in this investigation.”

They argued that Hur was treating Biden differently from other witnesses who also had trouble recalling long-ago events, and that he did so “in prejudicial and inflammatory terms.”

“You refer to President Biden’s memory on at least nine occasions — a number that is itself gratuitous,” they wrote. “This language is not supported by the facts, nor is it appropriately used by a federal prosecutor in this context. We request that you revisit your descriptions of President Biden’s memory and revise them so that they are stated in a manner that is within the bounds of your expertise and remit.”

However, it appears that Hur did not alter the report in response to the attorneys’ arguments.

The report cites Biden’s recorded conversations with his ghostwriter in 2017, saying they are “often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.” It added, “In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse.”

In addition to recounting Biden’s troubles with dates, the prosecutors suggested he had confused other matters as well. “His memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he ‘had a real difference’ of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally.”

Biden is also portrayed as a pack rat who haphazardly stored classified documents in a crowded garage. Documents related to Afghanistan, they wrote, were found “in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood.”

That state of affairs, they said, could be used by Biden’s attorneys to suggest to a jury that he was merely messy and forgetful, not someone who was intentionally trying to hoard classified documents.

“A reasonable juror could conclude that this is not where a person intentionally stores what he supposedly considers to be important classified documents, critical to his legacy,” the report stated. “Rather, it looks more like a place a person stores classified documents he has forgotten about or is unaware of.”

In a statement Thursday, House Republican leaders, including Speaker Mike Johnson (La.), called the special counsel’s assessment of Biden’s memory one of the “most disturbing” aspects of his report.

“A man too incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office,” said the statement by Johnson, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.).

Trump is facing charges under more serious allegations for taking classified documents, particularly his alleged refusal to return them when asked. And Trump, 77, has struggled with his own memory issues, most recently confusing former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, his chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, with former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

As mentioned, old Joe is upset with the report but the good news is is anger won't last since he'll likely have forgotten about it by tomorrow morning.

Or he's been like that for some time, and it's really coming to the fore because, for some reason, they're not trying to hide it anymore.

Some Biden allies initially downplayed the severity of the report, saying it would be largely forgotten within days. But as the full scope of the report emerged, Biden officials and allies conceded the portrait of Biden would have lasting consequences and provide a gift to the Trump campaign. Still, they forcefully rejected any talk of the president stepping aside and not running for reelection.

Yeah... we'll see about that.

[Stoic]

Probably not much choice. It appears to be an open and shut case.

It would appear to be and open and shut case, unless you were to actually read the report, and take note of every use of the phrase "reasonable doubt".